Does your static content have a problem? It’s great content, right? You research the topics before you create your content, invest time and resources into design and copy, and then you measure it meticulously - going over every clicked link, share, comment, etc. But what about engagement - how interested in your content are your users? If you’re not launching interactive content, chances are you have no idea.

Engagement — gosh, I love that word. To me, engagement used to mean either a stage in a relationship or an affair that required me to get dressed in evening wear… not anymore. Engagement is a word hat I hear almost daily from our internal teams or customers but nobody is proposing marriage or a night out on the town…

“How can we get more engagement from this piece of content?”

I have seen some beautiful pieces of static content over the years; interesting copy, beautiful imagery, and delivered to me at the right moment but unless I took time out of my day to tell the creator that I loved it, they would never know. Think about that for just one moment — you created something beautiful, you know that I downloaded it, but you don’t know anything about what happened next. Did I immediately delete it from my download folder, did I email it as an attachment to my co-worker, or did I print it and highlight interesting stats, comments, and points throughout it? You will never know how engaged of a reader I was and that should make your wonder if all of your effort was for nothing.

I hosted a webinar this week with my coworker and webinar partner extraordinaire Audrey Ross, ion’s Director of Customer Engagement. We covered a lot and even had a really great Q&A session after. We didn’t have enough time to get to every question but we answered what we could and I really felt a commonality amongst every single attendee — a thirst to find a content strategy that could build stronger relationships with their customers and prospects. It really does not matter what industry, marketers want engagement! Interactive content is the answer and not just because I work for an interactive content company.

46% of marketers strongly agree that interactive content grabs the attention of the reader more effectively than static content

We do not just create content for the sake of creating content, right? We have goals in mind, achievements to make, benchmarks to meet and the only way to do that is to capture our user’s attention as soon as they land on our experience.

Do you remember the days when we were hard focused on getting everything that was important above the fold? I certainly do. And while we still need to take that real estate into consideration, placing important content below the fold no longer means it will be ignored. Interactive content can be used throughout an experience, calling user attention to key elements using animations or sticky navigation or reveal tiles that activate on hover. All of these engagement points are measured on the backend, showing true results of how interested in your content users were.

Even though you cannot capture insights from your static content, does not mean you should remove it from your strategy entirely. Static and interactive content should work together to achieve our goals. One of the most common use cases for this is an interactive infographic paired with a static white paper or ebook. The infographic can work as a teaser to get users interested in the content within the PDF. Interaction with the content serves as the engagement points and then a call-to-action will often take the user to a form where they can gain access to that static asset.

A interactive piece of content paired with a static PDF is a great way to reimagine and repurpose your tried and true content. We have hosted webinars and wrote blogs about this before. If you are curious about creating interactive content from your static PDF’s I suggest you check out the following content pieces:

Engagement is what you want, right? Well, interactive content can provide it. For more tips on launching an interactive content marketing program, check out our site and resources at ioninteractive.com!